I'm glad you liked the story. I'm relieved my son is smarter than I
was. My only worry is how to teach patience. Doing well means
careful planning or at least careful rework as goals get loftier.
There's so much pressure these days to do things in a hurry "so it
works" and leave it half-baked.
That's how we left the project, actually. It did what it was
supposed to. If he's interested, we can go back and add bells and
whistles and discover some elegance in PLT's bag of tricks. I'm on
the lookout for signs of a project he'll want to do on his own, e.g.,
he said he wants to make his own computer game. My 7 year-old,
meanwhile, is dying to figure out how Sim City 4 works so he can
amass a fortune and build a research facility, a prerequisite for a
space port. It was a lot easier in 1975 when I could just press Ctrl-
C, edit the BASIC code to Star Trek and battle Klingons on my terms.
Geoffrey
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Geoffrey S. Knauth | http://knauth.org/gsk